I contacted a dealer today on a 17 model that had been on the lot for a year and a half and after rejecting their offer was getting the this is a strong offer we are close to invoice. I told them they were 1000’s off where they needed to be and he came back 1500 lower. I just thanked him for his time and moved on.
If a dealer still has a 17 left, they will literally have to lose thousands to sell it. And the longer they wait the more they will lose.
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Time on lot is not a good indicator of whether the dealer will do a deal. It’s often a good sign they won’t. A better indicator is the number of cars as they are more likely to be volume sellers and aggressive on price. A car on the lot too long could indicate the dealer isn’t flexible on price.
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Alternatively the VIN plate on the door will give you a manufacture date, so at the very least you have a rough idea if it’s not coming up for you on carjojo or something like that. Some dealers leave it showing in photos which is helpful. Edmunds also has some cars listed for sale by Vin if you search and will mention the time on the lot.
I’ve noticed this is particularly true of smaller dealers. At some point they invoke the sunk cost fallacy and would rather wait for that special someone to come pay what they are asking then make a deal. This applies to used cars a lot due to the reduced margins.
I agree with this. Name brand dealers want to move cars to hit manufacturer incentives. For makes that often lease (so maybe not Honda) selling before the manufacturer pulls lease support is also important.
But little guys selling used are willing to hold onto cars for inexplicably long amounts of time. It seems like a poor use of capital though since instead of buying and selling three cars with that money, they sit on one and try to make a little bit higher margin. Low interest rates over past ten years help make this strategy possible even if the economics don’t actually make sense.
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Has anyone come up with a Flooring Cost model, i know there are a lot of variables, but this 1% general rule of thumb came out with quite a few variables also 
I’ve been looking into that a bit. This was a nice starting point in figuring that kind of stuff out: https://www.coxautoinc.com/learning-center/three-floor-plan-finance-formulas-every-dealer-know/
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Vehicle age on lot has never been something I had success using to negotiate a better deal. You just can’t predict when/for what reason a dealer is motivated to move a unit. There are so many variables and they’re different from dealer to dealer. To simply say “because it’s been there X days they must want to discount to move it” just doesn’t work in my experience.
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Agreed, but wouldnt you rather know than not know or are you saying it doesnt matter in your negotiations? I doubt it matters to the sales person, but the number cruncher in the back i’m sure is screaming, we have someone interested in the 200 day + car!!!
All i know for certain is the end of the month or even better end of the month/fiscal year to get a good deal 
Has never been a factor for me personally. How would you even know if it’s a contributing factor to whatever deal they’re giving you? They’re not going to tell you “you know what, I’ll just give you a bigger discount because we’ve had the car for X days”
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Under some circumstances that info may be good to know.
Lets say you have a 2018 car thats been on the lot for 240 days, its July 9th, and its well known in the industry that next model year’s car is going to be the same, but on the 2019 you can get it in a 2wd or 4wd config vs the 2018 4wd only. This also drops the price of the MSRP $2000 dollars, so $50000 car is now starting at $48,000 or roughly $83 bucks a month on a 24 month lease 
But I understand what you are saying 
I smell Stelvio in this story.
Interestingly when I was at the first Alfa dealer they told me he would rather make a deal on older inventory than newer, but ultimately he just wanted to make a deal.
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What is this Stelvio you speak of? Is it like a cheap Maserati? 
Basically when i go car shopping on the internets it usually ends up with about 30 tabs open on my browser.
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We are the same. I think I found the limit in Edge for tabs… I had like 70 open and the whole thing just went to hell…
Thanks for validating that I am not alone…
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No, it’s wildly inaccurate. Also they’ll often show cars on there that have been sold for weeks.
That’s a great article - thanks for posting. Really shows how easily quantifiable metrics support that most dealers should not sit on inventory for 6+ months. I can’t prove it but I would guess the big automotive sellers, particularly the publically traded ones, have consultants/in house numbers people advising them on these sort of things while the little used sellers are more attached to hunches and ignoring sunk costs/economic modeling. Little guys have to adapt and keep nimble since they are already at a huge disadvantage.